Features for the SimplePie Feeds as of version (1.0 Beta 3.1)

SimplePie supports everything from the old-school RSS 0.91 and RSS 1.0 formats, to the ever-popular RSS 2.0 format, and also supports the emerging Atom format, in both 0.3 and 1.0 flavors.

When we built SimplePie, we wanted to make it dead-easy for PHP beginners to be able to pick it up immediately, but still allow greater functionality for the more advanced PHP coders. We think we’ve been pretty successful with that.

SimplePie has a very fast, very efficient caching system. By caching the processed data, rather than just the raw XML, we’ve been able to create a feed parser that’s really freakin’ quick. There are also some enhancements on the list that will allow us to make caching even more efficient.

With SimplePie’s built-in subscription support, your readers can easily add feeds (including yours) to a variety of popular (and even not-so-popular) online feed readers and aggregators. With one-click support for del.icio.us, Digg, Newsvine, and others, they can get your blog or news entries into the heart of the Blogosphere. And with Technorati, they can easily get an idea of how popular you really are.

SimplePie has support for feed enclosures. More often than not, these enclosures are podcasts or videocasts. And if that podcast or videocast is in one of several popular formats, SimplePie can even embed the podcast in the page itself. No more having to download the podcast and load it into a player manually. SimplePie makes watching or listening to podcasts simple!

SimplePie can auto-detect the location of the syndication feed for websites that have feed auto-discovery enabled (which is most blogs and personal sites, and even many business sites).

SimplePie protects you from potentially dangerous code. A few years ago, I went to read the feed of Mark Pilgrim and my feed reader was filled with platypi. Mark followed that prank the next day with an article called “how to consume RSS safely”. Rogue feeds can potentially cause all sorts of mischief on your system, so we’ve implemented these suggestions into SimplePie.

SimplePie no longer is a victim of that drawback. Now you can view feed content the way the author always intended—with the images inline with the content. No more worrying about whether a website is blocking hotlinks or not. Just read your favorite blog posts without a care in the world.

Whether it’s the UTF-what’s-it or the ISO-who’s-it, SimplePie has it handled. The new SimplePie comes with significantly improved support for non-Latin languages. Specifically, it supports 98 different character sets. It also has much better support for detecting what character set the feed is being published with, so that the feed can be displayed in the proper language.

SimplePie has limited support for stripping ads from feeds. We hate it when people put ads in their feeds—it’s so distracting when you’re trying to read.

SimplePie allows you to use custom classes in-place of the built-in ones. This allows you to tweak, change and improve to your heart’s content without having to write your own feed parser. Awesomeness is now included.

SimplePie is now supported on PHP 5 as well as PHP 4.3 and 4.4. This pretty much covers 90-some-odd percent of all PHP installations, meaning that regardless of your server configuration, SimplePie can work for you.

SimplePie is now licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, which is one of the most flexible licenses available. You can do whatever you want with SimplePie, and we like that. Just make sure that you give credit where credit is due.